Unskilled workers: a new social class?

Thomas Amossé et Olivier Chardon

In March 2002, just less than five million people were in unskilled employment: 2,760,000
were white-collar workers and 2,035,000 were blue-collar workers. Far from disappearing
with deindustrialisation, unskilled employment has been growing since the mid-1990s:
today, one in five jobs is in unskilled employment.
The analysis of the survey results confirms the assimilation to workers of a segment
of this unskilled employment, which has been revealed up until now by sociological
observation. Unskilled blue-collar and white-collar workers constitute a distinct
segment of the workforce because of their salaries, terms and conditions of employment
and working conditions. However, they do not seem to constitute a social class: weakened
by their professional integration, with a destabilised social image, these workers
are characterised by a weak sense of belonging to a social class.
Class identity, which once played an important structural role in the working classes,
has been gradually eroded, leaving the unskilled workers with an attitude of «withdrawal»,
somewhere between rejection and resignation, with regard to the dominant models of
social integration. For workers at the bottom of the ladder, different forms of identity
construction contrast certain underpopulations, i.e. young and old, men and women,
immigrants and non-immigrants.